News, notes and maybe a little snark from the world of Breyer model horses.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Featured Model - 10/1/2016, Saltire

Hello and welcome to the latest installment of Featured Model, the weekly event where I choose a random model from my collection, give some stats and provide commentary about it. This week's model is...Saltire!

Saltire was a special run for Breyerfest 2008. The theme that year was Global Gallop, and Saltire represented Scotland in the special run lineup. 1,050 of these beauties were produced. Saltire was produced on the popular Wintersong/Othello mold, first introduced as a porcelain in 1999 before eventually debuting in plastic in 2007.

Othello is one of my favorite molds, and I have almost all of his plastic releases. I've always liked draft horses, and I love his fluffy feets. Did I already say that about Brishen? I can't remember. This one is a popular guy in my house - only Adios outnumbers him on the shelves. (Edited to add: Whoops! Adios and Wintersong are now tied at 17 as of my latest purchase.) I can't wait for the unicorn to hurry up and get here already!

This particular individual is a little hard to look at, unfortunately. It's visible in the photo that he has some damage to the finish; he looked like he had a few scuffs in the sale photos, but the price was decent, so I took a chance. Unfortunately, he was shipped with almost no padding in a box that was far too small, and his left ear and the end of his tail actually punched through the side of the box. It's only by some miracle that he didn't get broken on his way to me. He arrived right before Breyerfest, and I was too busy with Breyerfest prep to do anything about it. So, at some point I'll have to send him off to get restored, but for the time being he's chilling on the shelf with his buddies.

One of my greatest fears is that this mold will eventually end up being used as the Breyerfest volunteer model and I won't be able to volunteer or get my hands on him for a non-insane price. Next year's theme being India mitigates that to an extent, but it won't fully go away until we find out what the volunteer model actually is. Talk about a first-world problem, huh? Worst case scenario: I'll have to save up my pennies. But hopefully it doesn't come to that!